How can I see the changes in a Git commit?

Question

When I do git diff COMMIT I see the changes between that commit and HEAD (as far as I know), but I would like to see the changes that were made by that single commit.

I haven't found any obvious options on diff / log that will give me that output.

Solution 1

To see the diff for a particular COMMIT hash, where COMMIT is the hash of the commit:

git diff COMMIT~ COMMIT will show you the difference between that COMMIT's ancestor and the COMMIT. See the man pages for git diff for details about the command and gitrevisions about the ~ notation and its friends.

Alternatively, git show COMMIT will do something very similar. (The commit's data, including its diff - but not for merge commits.) See the git show manpage.

(also git diff COMMIT will show you the difference between that COMMIT and the head.)

Solution 2

As mentioned in "Shorthand for diff of git commit with its parent?", you can also use git diff with:

git diff COMMIT^!

or

git diff-tree -p COMMIT

With git show, you would need (in order to focus on diff alone) to do:

git show --color --pretty=format:%b COMMIT

The COMMIT parameter is a commit-ish:

A commit object or an object that can be recursively dereferenced to a commit object. The following are all commit-ishes: a commit object, a tag object that points to a commit object, a tag object that points to a tag object that points to a commit object, etc.

See gitrevision "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" to reference a commit-ish.
See also "What does tree-ish mean in Git?".

Solution 3

You can also try this easy way:

git show <COMMIT>

Solution 4

git show shows the changes made in the most recent commit. It is equivalent to git show HEAD.

git show HEAD~1 takes you back one commit.

Solution 5

I usually do:

git diff HEAD~1

To show the changes regarding the last commit. If you have more commits just increase the number 1 to how many commits diff you want to see.

View more solutions

Comments

[Chris Maes]

possible duplicate of Shorthand for diff of git commit with its parent?

[Stephane Chazelas]

Note that the ^ needs to be quoted in the Thomson and Bourne shells (synonym for | there) and rc and its derivatives (caret operator) and in zsh with extendedglob enabled (not globbing operator)

[Richard]

Your rewording would apply to git diff HEAD HEAD^.

[VonC]

Would that work too with git log? (because of stackoverflow.com/a/18585297/6309)

[user3690202]

This doesnt work anymore. git diff HEAD^ HEAD doesn't show anything.

[user3690202]

git diff HEAD^ HEAD doesn't display any changes.

[Admin]

@user3690202 so that implies that there aren't any changes to display. Is that actually the case?

[Nevik Rehnel]

@user3690202, yes it does. If the diff doesn't show anything, it means the diff is empty (there's no difference between HEAD^ and HEAD). This can especially be the case when you do things like ignoring whitespace, or if you simply have to identical commits.

[user3690202]

How can there not be any changes to display? If you want to view the last commit, surely unless it is a completely new repository there will be some changes to display?

[user3690202]

There was definitely a non-whitespace commit there - I know because I just committed it literally 5 minutes before trying to view what I committed. There must be some other situations where this doesn't work.

[Admin]

@user3690202 it's possible to make an "empty commit" with Git that doesn't actually contain any changes from the parent, although there is a built-in safeguard that checks for and prevents this, though it is overridable with a command line option. I doubt that you would intentionally create an empty commit, so another possibility is that you somehow have pre-commit line-ending conversion on (or other funny whitespace stuff) that is tricking Git into thinking that no changes have actually been made. What platform are you running Git on?

[Nevik Rehnel]

@user3690202, if that continues to be a problem (or just interests you), you should open a new question describing your situation in detail and trying to reproduce it ;)

[MartenBE]

@user3690202 use "": git diff "HEAD^" HEAD, worked for me

[Mansour]

Note that HEAD^ implies first parent in case a commit has multiple parents (ie merge commit).

[Juuso Ohtonen]

git diff COMMIT~ COMMIT works for me, notice the tilde instead of caret. I'm running git version 2.6.1.windows.1 on Windows 10.

[tradetree]

"git show COMMIT" didn't work for me, but "git show $COMMIT" did. I think this is a typo in the answer?

[Nick Matteo]

@tradetree: the word COMMIT is supposed to be replaced with the name of some commit, e.g. the SHA sum.

[pypmannetjies]

I feel like git show is more appropriate for this question and should be the suggestion mentioned first.

[Lauri Nurmi]

If using bash, COMMIT^ COMMIT can be abbreviated as COMMIT{^,}.

[Tim Goodman]

@JuusoOhtonen In theory a single ^ would do the same thing as a single ~, but I believe you need to put quotes around the ^ as Stephane suggested. That's what I found to be the case when running git from the Windows command prompt.

[Franziska]

You can also extend this command with file specification (for example to exclude fixture files): git diff COMMITID^ COMMITID *.yml <--- shows only changed yml files

[Daniel Garmoshka]

This answer contains too much obscuring information (long introduction about git diff which already known by author)

[Martín Coll]

What does the ^! mean??

[Mohideen bin Mohammed]

^! is the shorthand for commit^..commit which means will exclude all parents and check diff in that commit

[user829755]

I'm not an expert but I have a case (with multiple branches being involved) where git log c^! is not exactly the same as git log c^..c. In fact it's much better: git log c^..c listed too many entries while git log c^! did the right thing, so this is what I was looking for for a long time

[Miserable Variable]

It seems this does something quite different

[Shibir Basak]

This is what you mean, git diff HEAD^1 HEAD

[林果皞]

"If you want to see the actual diff, run git --stat a2a2894 3a1ba8f". I think you mean git diff a2a2894 3a1ba8f or else unknown option: --stat.

[brainplot]

Note that this will show what you added as removed, as it will do a reverse comparison. The way you should read the diff command is: what would I need to change in the file to get from commit HEAD to commit HEAD^1?

[k0pernikus]

It only shows the commit message. Not the diff of the code changes applied for this commit.

[ShellFish]

I don't understand why this answer was downvoted. I agree that command line and text based stuff is the way to go but gitk gives a lot of useful information.

[Roel]

This should be the answer.

[JobHunter69]

@k0pernikus it does for me

[MichaelMoser]

git log --name-only - for listing the changed files. Or git log --name-status --find-renames - to get the list of changed files with the kind of change (added/modified/renamed, etc)

[CallMarl]

git diff <commit_Id> on/specific/file.txt

[CallMarl]

gitk is not git it's spécifique package and it doesn't exist on every OS where git could be installed.tig is also good tools as many others.

[xeruf]

To show the changes of the last commit, simply use git show ;)

[Mecki]

git show COMMIT already shows the changeset for normal commits. It only won't show it for merges.

[Peter Mortensen]

Is a SHA-1 hash the only possibility (not a rhetorical question)? What about, e.g., HEAD~3?

[Iwnnay]

Yes, you could use something like git show HEAD~3 HEAD It's a little clunkier than other git commands, but it works.

[Jari Turkia]

There should be command git diff COMMIT^ (literal). Nobody cares what the most recent commit hash is.

[Weihang Jian]

Note that there is no way to show only diff by git show. If you want to output only diff, use git diff.

[Andrew Falanga]

Upvoted because this was actually what I was looking for. I stumbled onto this question because "see changes in commit" can mean a few different things. I wanted to see the files that changed, not actually what changed in them. Keep reading for very good answers to seeing what changed in the file.

[transposeglobal]

I'm trying to run these commands on a GitHub action that uses Ubuntu, and it doesn't like git diff $GITHUB_SHA^ $GITHUB_SHA. It gives the error: fatal: ambiguous argument '<GITHUB_SHA>^': unknown revision or path not in the working tree. I've also tried with the ~. Any ideas on how to get this to work in a Github action workflow?

[alfredo]

Sometimes, this command shows the commit message.

[alfredo]

Not works. Only show the commit message

[Binita Bharati]

Great answer. Like the output format of this command.